Author: Victoria Rike | Major: English: Rhetoric and Composition | Semester: Fall 2024
Taken in Skala Sykaminias, a fishing village where many refugees arrive after crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey, the land picture in the background
I didn’t always pay attention on my week long class trip to Lesvos, Greece, even though I should have. Standing in an asylum seeker cemetery as a speaker from the non-government organization (NGO), Earth Medicine, answered questions, I counted the number of olive trees behind her. I put numbers to the branches and individual fruits—even to the leaves. There are over 10 million olive trees in Lesvos, and though I didn’t count them all, it felt like I did that morning. As she spoke about the grossly insufficient medical care refugees in Lesvos receive, I said the letters on the car next to her in my head over and over: A-U-T-O D-A-M-I-G-O-S. I mentally listed the colors each speaker was wearing and then counted the number of Sambas in my school group, trying to do the percentage in my head. What’s 9/20? 45%? That’s a lot of Sambas.
My class has been learning about Europe’s horrible treatment of asylum seekers for months with a focus on Denmark and Greece. It’s the main course I am taking this fall semester at DIS: Copenhagen since I have an interest in international law. I am currently an English major with Fulbright College. My course with DIS has spoken to people whose cases have been rejected and are living in conditions worse than prisons. Sometimes, they have to live there for many years. In Denmark, we heard from women afraid they will be, along with their children, taken from their beds at night and forced onto a plane when no one is awake to record this injustice. I have seen burned children’s toys at the site of the infamous Moria camp that was described as a place worse than Hell.
It takes time to process things—so they tell me. Honestly, I never expected it to hit me like it did.
The graves at the cemetery in Lesvos we visited are cement rectangles filled with white stones that cover the plots. On top of the stones, volunteers place a single pink plastic rose on each. The entire site has been recently renovated to provide the deceased and their families more respect than the hasty, hardly marked burials that had been done before.
When we first arrived, we were told to walk around and “get a sense of the place” before the session with the speaker from Earth Medicine. Many of the people there had died in the last 15 years while trying to cross the sea and seek refugee status in Europe. I came upon a grave without its flower, and my eyes started to well without warning. My grandmother passed away unexpectedly the first week I was in Copenhagen, and I guess I was processing that as well. I found a spare flower that had blown away and placed it on the grave, thinking of this man’s journey ending too soon and all the ways this cemetery could have been avoided.
It is currently standard practice to do “pushbacks” against refugees leaving Turkey trying to get to Lesvos. Government boats create heavy waves to disrupt travel, shoot at crossers, and arrest asylum seekers for smuggling if they steer a refugee boat, even if they were forced to under threat of violence. These trials often are less than half an hour long and involve decades-long sentences.
During the discussion, my mind kept wandering to those murderous pushbacks, the sterile, unsafe refugee camp currently on Lesvos, and on a personal note, that I hadn’t yet been able to pay respects to my own grandmother’s grave. I thought of the plots marked Unknown, the dozens of children there, and a quote written on the walls at a burned building in Moria.
You have to understand
No one puts their children in a boat
Unless the water is safer than the land.
– Warsan Shire
However, I wasn’t completely lost during the NGO’s discussion of the site. They emphasized that they did not want people to come to the cemetery and only be sad. They encourage visitors to also look at the work volunteers have put in to honor the refugees and see the hope. It is an incredibly emotionally taxing field, and handling this strain takes practice, which I have a long way to go on.
As dogs trotted about the semi-circle my class had formed to hear Earth Medicine, I felt the weight of the 199 graves behind us and everything we had learned coming to a head. I put sunglasses on my stinging eyes, and counted the olive trees.